December 31, 2004

WHEN REASON DIED AS A LIBERTARIAN MAGAZINE: It was at 1:17 p.m. Pacific Time today, with this post by Tim Cavanaugh, savaging a man who patronized the tourist industry in Thailand instead of donating money.

There’s still a bit of life in the comments, but that’s just the corpse twitching.

UPDATE: Kevin O’Meara emails:

My family had a tourist store in San Francisco that folded after the quake of ’89. It wasn’t the quake that did it – it was the fact that tourists avoided San Francisco for months after the quake, despite pleas from the city that things were basically fixed.

So, the argument is that the way you “help” Thailand after the tsunami is to boycott Thailand’s largest industry by refusing to visit there?

It’s not a boycott, exactly. Just a sort of sympathetic shunning, I guess.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tim Blair notes that the Thais are desperate for tourist dollars right now to finance rebuilding, and are asking tourists to come.

In fact, here’s what the Thais are saying: “If you want to help Phuket and people living here, come back for holidays!”

But what do they know? Greedy capitalists!

MORE: Rajan Rishyakaran: “You don’t help a people by boycotting their main industry . . . . Now is a really good time to vacation in other parts of Thailand – far less tourists! Bali’s open too – it’s far from Aceh. And trust me, most resorts in Penang are okay.”

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